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State of the Art

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The Role of Psychological Reactance in Human–Computer Interaction

Part of the book series: T-Labs Series in Telecommunication Services ((TLABS))

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Abstract

The state of the art chapter gives an overview on psychological reactance. Psychological reactance can be split up into two concepts. The first concept is state reactance. State reactance is a motivational state that people can enter after experiencing a threat to their freedom of choice or them being in control. The other concept is trait reactance. Trait reactance is a personality trait and can be regarded as a person’s proneness of entering a reactant state. State reactance is the main focus of this book. At first, possible consequences of state reactance are introduced. These are typical behaviors that people engage in when they enter a reactant state. Afterward, the construct of state reactance is introduced in detail. It is argued, that state reactance can be regarded as an intermixture of negative cognitions and anger. After the concept of state reactance has been introduced, possible moderator variables are described which might influence the effect of state reactance on the acceptance of technical devices or services. Following the moderators, different techniques of assessing state reactance are introduced, which may be used to measure state reactance in the course of this work. The next section introduces the concept of trait reactance. Trait reactance is a personality trait that is relatively stable over time and does not depend on the current situation. Afterward, different questionnaires that can be used to measure a person’s level of trait reactance are introduced. One of these questionnaires has been undergoing an extensive amount of tests and revisions since its introduction. In order to illustrate its problematic factor structure, the history of this test is presented in detail. The identified assessment tools for state and trait reactance are discussed in terms of their usefulness for reactance research in the context of human–computer interaction at the end of Part I. It is concluded that two of the trait reactance measures are adequate to be used as unidimensional questionnaires in the further course of this work. However, no measure for state reactance is regarded as adequate, therefore a new questionnaire has to be constructed.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For an overview of reactance research refer to [36].

  2. 2.

    For a deeper introduction see Sect. 2.3.

  3. 3.

    This technique was applied in Sect. 9.3 for the validation of a state reactance questionnaire.

  4. 4.

    Cronbach’s \(\alpha \) is a measure of internal consistency, which can range from 0 to 1, with 1 being of perfect internal consistency [9].

  5. 5.

    EN: “questionnaire for the assessment of psychological reactance”.

  6. 6.

    He argued that providing Cronbach’s \(\alpha \) was not necessary, because the model validity was proven for a rating-scale model. Instead of Cronbach’s \(\alpha \), indices for individual items were provided.

  7. 7.

    Tucker and Byers based their work on their translation of the FBMPS [29, 48], however, these items were later used as a basis of the HPRS [20].

  8. 8.

    A social desirability effect is when a participant reports or replies in a way that he or she thinks is socially desirable, instead of his or her true opinion [13].

  9. 9.

    See Table 2.1 for an overview of the research that has been conducted and the resulting factor structure.

  10. 10.

    Questionnaires should be as short as possible to be easily included in the test battery of laboratory experiments and online studies.

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    Patrick Ehrenbrink

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Ehrenbrink, P. (2020). State of the Art. In: The Role of Psychological Reactance in Human–Computer Interaction. T-Labs Series in Telecommunication Services. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30310-5_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30310-5_2

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